


A House for Kings

by Keturagh



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Angst, F/M, Female My Unit | Byleth, Fire Emblem: Three Houses Spoilers, If I write more of this there will be sex., Mute My Unit | Byleth, Post-Timeskip (Fire Emblem: Three Houses), Prince Edgelord, Sign Language
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-08-11
Updated: 2019-08-11
Packaged: 2020-08-19 01:41:20
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 607
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20201647
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Keturagh/pseuds/Keturagh
Summary: What is one more ghost in the heart of a king?





	A House for Kings

How serene it made the world seem, this quality of golden light settling on the cut stone; such a light could make something so hard seem beautiful, could it not? The stonemason’s hand had been at work however many years ago, shaping, chiseling, perhaps while a child toddled at her side, brought her cold water from a basin in a clay cup; a child could learn to lay a floor so that it would last under the use of many boots. A stonemason could take the rock unburied from the earth, and craft with it a palace, or a monastery… or a home. 

Dimitri had always been able to imagine, too well, the faces and the lives of craftsmen whose work he walked upon, or swung with his sword arm, or rode into battle: stonemasons, blacksmiths, equerries. Dimitri had always been mindful of such small, poignant ways his life brushed up against the lives of others, even as a youth. Had he been so lonely in his childhood that he had begun to imagine the ways that he held some sort of tenuous connection to other people? He folds his arms on his knees and closes his eye. The night will be here soon, and it will be cold. He remembers being a child and dreaming up, obsessively almost, the life of whoever it had been who had sewn the quilt on his bed. He had given this person features, elaborating further each night before sleep took him: they had a kind face, much like the cook's face, and a wobbly part under their chin, and they were old, and they had nimbly-moving, wrinkled hands. And sometimes he imagined them singing the chant-songs from the long boring hours he spent at worship (where he would always be itchy, but forbidden to unclasp his hands and scratch behind his knee). He could not remember the words, so he would make his dream-person hum the tune. And while they hummed, he imagined, they'd make the quilt he was laying under in the dark, working needle and thread in another quiet night. A quiet night which had no doubt passed long before his birth, though he never imagined them dead; he knows now they must have been long dead, the real quilter, and as a child he took from the surviving family even the memory of the crafter's face, concocting his own histories of objects in the place of their unknown origins.

And now he takes from others further: he fills his belly with vegetables he has not grown, he wears clothes he's stolen off fences, he drinks water captured in the rain barrels of inns. A thief.

But what is a noble, but a thief of others’ time?

What is a king, but a thief of others’ peace?

Dimitri is not now a noble or a king, but only a thief. He feels sickly triumphant to, finally, live so honestly.

All is as it should be. All is as it has always been, as has always been the fate of kings: he is alone. Now one stone lays beside its brothers, bathed in golden light, a simple thing. There was a stonemason who laid the stone. There is the twilight sun, which shines upon it. Honest things. Simple things. Good and righteous things: stones, and the shapers of them.

Her boots step into that golden light, and Dimitri has imagined it so many times, he is exhausted by this newest visitation of his imaginings, when all he wishes for is a sleep not too broken by the night’s cold.

“I should have known you’d come to haunt me too.”

**Author's Note:**

> my girlfriend likes this sad man so ngl i'm writing this so she will pay attention to me


End file.
